The top picture is a 20-drop wallpaper designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet in 1804. It depicts Captain James Cook’s adventures in NZ and South Pacific Islands. 200 years later, Maori artist Lisa Reihana redesigned the artwork to make it more realistic with what happened from a different viewpoint.
The British seemed to like the idea of the exotic, foreign and ‘magical’. The Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in 1851 is another example of putting on display other countries and nationalities, which was copied at The Wintergardens in Auckland in 1913. This way of showing off foreign places and people is not necessarily a good thing, describing others as different and exotic tends to put people in a box that is not supposed to integrate with others.Â
The Wintergardens display of exotic plants is a nod to this history. Is it done kindly and with understanding and inclusion now? Or is the ‘exotic’ labelled and put in a box, meant to stay separate from our colonial way of life?